Cancer datasets and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: establishing principles for collaboration

Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic has been a major disruptive event for the global oncology community. It has challenged and compromised the delivery of oncological care as a result of (1) the diversion of resource to support the care of acutely and critically ill patients with COVID-19; (2) a reduction in the number of highly trained staff who deliver such treatments due to sickness, self-isolation or family reasons; and (3) concerns related to treating patients with cancer, given issues related to the potential risks of acquiring SARS-CoV-2 and the degree of severity of COVID-19 as a result of either innate or iatrogenic cancer-related immunodeficiency. The current peer-reviewed data regarding the course of COVID-19 in patients with cancer is limited to retrospective cases series of 11–105 patients with variability in the data reported and one study involving aggregate-level data from 334 patients. These datasets do not enable the identification of risk factors that might predispose to symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection nor do they identify those factors that predict for serious morbidity and mortality as a result of infection. Such information is urgently needed to inform the development of a robust evidence base approach to risk stratification by tumour and treatment type, as well as development and introduction of appropriate mitigation measures.

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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1136/esmoopen-2020-000825

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https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/cancer-datasets-and-the-sarscov2-pandemic(bfaf1d43-42f3-4143-a71a-8a57906eb125).html